A Venezuelan diplomat visited the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1950 and made a startling discovery. At the heart of the Vatican, in the place where the College of Cardinals meets to elect each new pope, Joaquin Diaz Gonzalez identified a colossal portrait of the medieval poet Dante contained within Michelangelo’s fresco of The Last Judgement. The artist, argued Gonzalez, had secretly arranged the figures of the resurrected into the distinctive profile of the Florentine author of The Divine Comedy, a hidden tribute to the writer whose great poem Michelangelo so admired he had learnt great tracts of it by heart.

As a devout Catholic, Gonzalez was troubled by his discovery. How could the artist give such prominence to anyone other than Christ in his depiction of the final reckoning? After scrutinising the painting for weeks, he found the answer: concealed in The Last Judgement was not just a portrait of Dante, but a giant depiction of Jesus as well. Gonzalez had missed it for nearly a month, but now he could see the contours of this huge image clearly. The spaces between the figures in the fresco formed the unmistakable outline of the saviour on the cross.

Gonzalez described his findings in a book published in Italy in 1951. It is now out of print, and his ideas have barely merited a footnote in the annals of art history. But the notion that Michelangelo placed hidden images in the Sistine Chapel is beginning to take hold.

Undoubtedly the phenomenal success of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, in which the paintings of Michelangelo’s contemporary Leonardo are found to contain the key to a secret concealed by the church for centuries, has helped to popularise the idea.

An internet search reveals that current theories about a “Michelangelo Code” in the Sistine Chapel range from subliminal messages demonstrating that the artist was a Satanist, to the suggestion that he predicted the arrival of aliens (the Roswell museum in New Mexico has a billboard inspired by one of the Sistine Chapel’s panels hanging above its car park).

But it is not just crackpots who believe in a Michelangelo Code. The latest scholarly proponents are Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a writer based in Rome who gives tours of the city and the Vatican to visiting Jewish VIPs. In their forthcoming book, The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo’s Defiant Masterpiece, published by JR Books, they argue that the entire Sistine Chapel should be read as a radically subversive decorative cycle that insults the pope who commissioned it, diverges from Catholic doctrine of the time, and proposes a “lost mystical message of universal love”, which Michelangelo intended as “a bridge” between the church and the Jewish faith. They say the key to this reading is found by unravelling the secret messages placed in the paintings by the artist “in the hope that eventually there would be those who would crack his code”.

Where Gonzalez saw hidden portraits, Blech and Doliner have found Hebrew letters. They say the figure of David in the painting showing his battle with Goliath is in the shape of the Hebrew letter gimel, which in the mystical Jewish tradition known as Kabbalah symbolises g’vurah, or strength. On the opposite wall, the scene showing Judith and her handmaiden carrying the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes is in the shape of the Hebrew letter chet, which represents chesed, or the characteristics of “loving kindness”. The figures of David and Judith were intended by the artist to be seen as the two sides of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life, say Blech and Doliner.

Their theory goes like this: as a teenager Michelangelo spent two years under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, mixing with the leading thinkers of the day. Lorenzo’s court was a liberal hotbed of ideas, some of which were later branded heretical by the church. And there was strong interest in Jewish culture and esoteric Hebrew texts that came to Florence when Lorenzo’s grandfather, Cosimo, allowed the Jews into the city, where some of them prospered for a time. At the Medici court, Michelangelo was exposed to the humanist philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, a proponent of Neoplatonism, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who incorporated a wide variety of texts into his teachings, including the Kabbalah. Michelangelo absorbed these syncretic philosophies, and some 20 years later he used the Sistine Chapel to illustrate them.

The problem with this argument is that it is highly speculative. Michelangelo did absorb classical and humanist philosophies in Florence, and there is evidence of this in his paintings, but the authors stretch the idea to breaking point, invalidating any legitimate arguments. The figures of Judith and David may seem to be the same shape as Hebrew letters, but there is no proof that Michelangelo intended this. The conjecture continues throughout the book, where the interpretation of almost every painting is wildly skewed to give a Jewish reading. In a bizarre example, the authors say the figure of St Lawrence beneath Christ in The Last Judgement is not holding the instrument of his execution, as tradition would have it (Lawrence is said to have been burnt alive on a gridiron by the Romans in the 3rd century): he is holding a ladder. “Jacob’s Ladder, to be exact,” they write. “This is the link between heaven and earth, humanity and angels, the material and spiritual worlds. The Kabbalah teaches that the entire creation revolves around this ladder.” And so they discover it at the centre of The Last Judgement.

Blech is an adviser to the Pave the Way Foundation, an organisation that describes itself as “dedicated to achieving peace by bridging the gap in tolerance and understanding between religions”. In January 2005 the foundation organised a visit of Jewish delegates to Rome to meet Pope John Paul II. Blech led the mission “to express thanks to the pope for all he had done for the Jewish people. He was the first pope to visit the [Wailing] Wall in Jerusalem, where he inserted a prayer asking God and the Jews for forgiveness”. In 2006, Blech also accompanied the current pope, Benedict XVI, to Auschwitz. Much of the rabbi’s life has been devoted to inter-faith dialogue, and his book would have us believe that Michelangelo was an early proponent of the same ideals and that he placed hidden messages illustrating these throughout the Sistine Chapel. This argument has two elements in common with all the other Michelangelo Code theories. The authors believe they are the first to have interpreted the paintings as the artist would have wished. Doliner likens the experience of writing the book to “finding a letter on the pavement and delivering it 500 years later”. The proponents of such theories see themselves as messengers. What seems to be important is the idea of a personal connection to the artistic genius, almost as if Michelangelo were whispering in their ears. Second, such theories are always developed not by art historians but by specialists in a different field or amateurs.

Art historians have written hundreds of books exploring the style and meaning of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, the conclusions of which often differ. Several thousand pages have been devoted to analysis of the artist’s influences, theology and philosophical leanings. There have been interpretations of the paintings as an expression of the artist’s repressed homoerotic impulses, and psychoanalytic readings that have sought to explain the works in relation to Michelangelo’s unresolved conflicts with his parents and his patron. But, by and large, they have dismissed theories that propose the artist deliberately hid images.

Vast amounts of documents relating to the artist’s life have survived. With the exception of popes and kings, Michelangelo is perhaps the most documented figure of the 16th century. There are two contemporary biographies and hundreds of surviving letters by the artist, and to him, and many others about him, as well as other paperwork. Art historians have spent time sifting through the evidence. Despite this wealth of material, almost no information on the decorative scheme of the Sistine Chapel or the intended meaning of the frescoes survives, making the paintings particularly amenable to hypothetical readings.

Here’s what we do know: in 1505, Pope Julius II summoned Michelangelo to Rome to create a funerary monument on a grand scale. The artist was considered the pre-eminent sculptor of his day, a reputation sealed a year earlier when he unveiled his statue of David showing him at the moment he has decided to battle Goliath. The work, hailed as a masterpiece, was placed in front of Florence’s town hall in Piazza della Signoria as a symbol of the city’s freedom. Once in Rome, Michelangelo began work on the pope’s tomb, but this stopped when Julius II decided to focus on the rebuilding of St Peter’s. After a dispute over money, Michelangelo fled Rome and returned to Florence.In 1508 the artist, then 33, was back. He had begrudgingly accepted the pope’s commission to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine with frescoes (Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor, not a painter). It took him four years, working with a team of assistants, and he decorated 12,000 sq ft, most of this being taken up by nine scenes from the Book of Genesis at the top and the figures of seven prophets and five pagan sibyls, who were believed to have predicted the arrival of Christ, around the base of the ceiling. Julius II had originally wanted Michelangelo to paint the ceiling with the figures of the 12 apostles and a vast geometric pattern. The artist argued against this. The pope “gave me a new commission to do what I liked”, he later wrote, a claim viewed with suspicion by most scholars, who generally believe that Michelangelo would have been guided by the pope’s theologians and advisers. This was, after all, an age when religious imagery was strictly controlled. But no information about this survives. Twenty-two years later he returned to paint The Last Judgement on the entire wall of the chapel behind the altar, following a commission from Pope Clement VII, filling it with the figures of the resurrected awaiting Christ’s verdict on their fate.

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The first Michelangelo Code theory to gain wide currency was put forward by a doctor from Indiana. In 1990, Frank Meshberger published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled An Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy. In this he argued that the central panel of the Sistine ceiling, which shows God on a cloud of angels and Adam reaching towards each other with fingers almost touching, contained a hidden message. “Look at the image that surrounds God and the angels. This image has the shape of a brain… the flowing green robe at the base represents the vertebral artery in its upward course as it twists and turns… the angel’s hip and leg represent the spinal cord. The pituitary stalk and gland are depicted by the leg and foot of the angel that extends below the base of the picture…” and so on. Michelangelo is known to have carried out the dissection of several corpses as a young man in Florence. One of his biographers, Giorgio Vasari, tells us that these were given to him by the prior of Santo Spirito, who put a room in the hospital at the artist’s disposal. This knowledge of anatomy, says Meshberger, enabled the artist to portray the contours of the human brain to signify that “what God is giving to Adam is the intellect”.

Meshberger’s theory spawned a host of other anatomical readings of the Sistine Chapel. In 2000, Dr Garabed Eknoyan, a nephrologist in Texas, published his discoveries in the medical magazine Kidney International. If one removes the figure of God and his coterie of angels from the panel depicting the separation of the earth from the waters, he wrote, the remaining outline of the Creator’s tunic is in the shape of a bisected right kidney. In Michelangelo’s day the kidney was thought to separate fluids from solids, so the artist was linking the hidden message to the theme of the painting itself. In 2005, two Brazilian doctors, Gilson Barreto and Marcelo de Oliveira, went much further. Inspired by Meshberger, they scanned the chapel and found images of hidden body parts everywhere. They say their discoveries were facilitated by clues that the artist encoded in his composition: fingers pointing in certain directions, or the way the light falls on a figure. They found organs on 34 panels. These include a bronchial tube concealed in a tree trunk in the panel depicting Creation of Eve. In the same scene, God’s robe is the shape of the side view of a lung. This, says Barreto, represents the Creator imparting the breath of life to the first woman. Elsewhere a bag with a frilly red border at the feet of the Cumaean Sibyl represents a human heart, diaphragm and aorta. The putti behind the Sibyl raise their arms to reveal their chests, hinting at the true message of the ensemble. These interpretations suggest that Michelangelo concealed human organs in the paintings as a way of celebrating the complexity of what God had created.

Where others have seen body parts, Blech and Doliner have discovered not just Hebrew letters but insults directed at the pope. They claim that Michelangelo disagreed so strongly with the prevailing Catholic doctrine, and was so disgusted with papal corruption and frustrated by his arguments with Julius II, he hid several obscene gestures directed at the pope within his paintings.

Above the entrance to the chapel that was used in the 16th century, Michelangelo painted the prophet Zechariah, who the authors believe was intended to represent the pope himself. Behind Zechariah are two putti. One of them “is making an extremely obscene hand gesture at the back of… Julius’s head. He has made a fist, with his thumb stuck between his index and middle fingers… this is the medieval and Renaissance version of what we would call today ‘giving someone the finger’ ”, they write.

Would Michelangelo have risked insulting a man who could have him thrown into prison, or worse? If Blech and Doliner can see the insult, why couldn’t the pope? Professor Charles Hope, of the Warburg Institute in London, rejects the idea of concealed insults as a “thoroughly modern reading” of the Sistine Chapel. “If you commissioned a work of religious art, it was because the subject mattered to you. The pope was happy with the Sistine ceiling; the College of Cardinals was happy with it. Why? Because it was consistent with Catholic belief.”

So where does the truth lie? Which of the Michelangelo Code theories is most plausible? In the end, says Hope, these theories are “impossible to refute. But they are also impossible to prove”.

One thing is certain: the Sistine Chapel is a complex decorative cycle containing over 300 figures.

If you stare at it for long enough looking for specific images, the way you might scan clouds, then you’re likely to find them. But even if you are unable to find a single “hidden” image within the frescoes, you will still be gazing at some of the most beautiful paintings ever created.

The end of the world as he drew it

Michelangelo’s frescoes clearly tell the story of God’s revenge against sinners, says Waldemar Januszczak

The Sistine Chapel is the most important church in the Catholic world. It has to be. It’s the pope’s private chapel. Not only does the conclave that selects the popes actually take place in here, but the chapel is also where the popes went for their private services, where they greeted

important visitors and mounted special prayers. So the crucial question that anyone trying to understand the real meaning of the Sistine Chapel has to ask themselves is: would any pope have allowed any artist to do as they

pleased inside the Sistine Chapel? Is it really likely, or possible, that Michelangelo would have filled the most important church in the Christian world with heresy and Judaism? Let me ask the question another way. If you were Roman Abramovich and you owned Chelsea football club, would you have allowed an artist to cover the walls of your new headquarters with Manchester United insignia?

The other big handicap afflicting modern commentators on the ceiling is their lack of understanding of the rhythms and moods of Catholicism. Back in the 19th century, various German-trained scholars began to understand the Sistine Chapel as a return to pagan values because their Protestantism blinded them to the intensity of Michelangelo’s Catholicism. Anyone who has felt Catholicism properly — and having spent my adolescence in a Catholic boarding school, going to mass daily, I certainly have — would recognise the Sistine Chapel’s mood immediately. This fretful, confessional, guilty and apocalyptic tone is Catholicism’s default mode. The Sistine may be lots of things, but above all it is a Catholic work of art.

Put these two facts together — the certainty that Michelangelo was working to papal direction, and the certainty that the ceiling’s meaning is driven by Catholic considerations — and you arrive at the launching pad for a true reading. Which is that the fresco is actually showing us God’s revenge on all us sinners: the end of the world. Not as a diagram or a code. But as a representation of the day itself. The actual moment.

The sheer size of the fresco can make it difficult to see that Michelangelo has set his action in a single space: the re-imagined temple in Jerusalem, re-created with lots of painted architecture. Inside this temple, something momentous is happening. And everyone on the ceiling has either just realised it or is about to. Because the day of atonement has arrived. And the reason why it has arrived is made clear by the Old Testament scenes taking place in the sky above their heads like a series of giant flashbacks. God creates Adam. Adam thanks him by sinning. God gets angry. But Adam’s successors sin on. Anyone who has sat through a Catholic sermon or two will know full well that threatening the congregation with the end of the world if they don’t stop their sinning and listen to the pope is a totally Catholic thing to do.